Freedom creates a star role

Osama's leading lady, Marina Golbahari, would like to be "a big star in America".

An Afghan film has brought new life to the country and its young star, writes Carlotta Gall.

Marina Golbahari, the star of the award-winning Afghan film Osama, is the envy of her classmates. She flaunts a new silky outfit and high-heeled black boots and says three of her school friends want to be in the movies too.

Yet her life has not changed dramatically since the Afghan film director Siddiq Barmak spotted her scavenging on the street one day about a year ago.

Despite the new clothes, Marina, 13, still looks much like the poor Kabuli child she was then. She is skinny, her hands rough, her face marked by sores. And though her family has moved into a two-room house bought with the help of Barmak and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian director who helped finance Osama, Marina refuses requests to be interviewed at her home. She is embarrassed by its meagre state and a little afraid of her father, who does not like visits from foreigners.

"We are living in very bad conditions, and when the rain and snow come, the roof leaks and drips everywhere," Marina says through an interpreter in an interview one afternoon at her school. "When guests come, there is no room for them to stay overnight."

Though she and her seven siblings no longer beg on the streets, the family survives mostly on the $US4 to $US6 ($A5.3 to $A8) a day that her father earns from his street stall selling music cassettes. The children spend their mornings at a government school and their afternoons at a charitable school for poor neighbourhood children, who get a daily meal and some basic classes there. Still, Marina, like Afghanistan itself, has come a long way.

When Barmak first asked her to sing for him, she thought he was going to offer her and her family some help, she recalls. But he wanted her to star in his film, the first feature made in Afghanistan since the fundamentalist Taliban movement, now ousted, took over Kabul in 1996, banning films, television and music.

The idea of movie acting shocked her at first. "No, I am not an infidel," she recalls telling Barmak.

The only films she had ever seen were Indian Bollywood productions, viewed at her aunt's house after the Taliban fell. Women in these movies are brazen by Afghan standards: dancing, baring their midriffs and even embracing men on screen.

"I was thinking it would be like Indian films," she says of Barmak's Osama, which recently won a Golden Globe award for best foreign-language film. "He laughed and said, 'No, it will not be like that.' "

Osama was to be about life under the Taliban, a subject Marina understood well. She plays a 12-year-old in Kabul whose father is dead and whose mother and grandmother are destitute and unable to feed their family. (Taliban restrictions forbade women to work or even to leave their homes without a male companion.)

With no man or boy around, her desperate mother cuts her daughter's hair, dresses her like a boy and sends her to work in a dairy shop.

"They cut my hair," Marina says. "It was difficult. How can a girl be made like a boy and go to work?" She adds, "In the film, I had to go to school with boys at a religious school, and then they find out that I am a girl, and they take me out and they punish me, and they put me down a well."

Being lowered down the well on a rope was frightening and made her cry, she says. But what upset her most was the ending, when she is pulled out of the well, declared a woman, covered in the all-enveloping burqa and married off to the old mullah who runs the religious school.

"He was old and had a white beard," she says, hiding her face in her veil in embarrassment. Even though she and the man were acting, the experience overwhelmed her. "I was crying afterwards as I went home," she remembers. "I was thinking, 'What did I do?' "

In a country where all marriages are arranged, the predicament of being wedded to an old man is every Afghan girl's dread. Marina recalls how two prepubescent girls from a neighbour's family were married to old men from the provinces.

"They promised they would stay in Kabul near their family, but they took them away," she says.

Marina went with her parents and two of her sisters to see Osama when it was first shown at the Kabul Cinema, one of the few working movie houses in the city. "I did not like it because it showed the times of the Taliban," she says.

"My mother, father and sisters went to see it," she adds. "They liked my acting, but when they put me down the well, my father fainted. My mother was also upset when they put me down the well. My sisters were saying: 'Well done! Well done! How did you dare go down the well?'"

If the filming sometimes made Marina cry, it was also fun and empowering for a girl once accustomed to begging. Her fee, slight by American standards, was an above-average salary for Afghanistan. "I earned $US110 a month while I was filming, and then we bought the house," she says. Barmak and Makhmalbaf put up $US10,000 to buy the two-room building so the family would no longer have to rent a house.

To ensure that Marina benefits from the property, Barmak says he has made a point of registering the house in her name, not her father's.

"We just need $US2000 more to fix the house up," Marina says. A French journalist has promised to help her with that.

Today Marina is a lively teenager with a busy life, happy the Taliban times are over, and a little star-struck. "I am very happy," she says. "School has started and the country is free."

She has made a second film, a short called Kurbani, or Sacrifice, a harrowing tale of an Afghan girl trying to save her sick mother.

She is preparing to do another short film, but already her father is telling her to stop acting, she says. (Even with the increased freedom here, acting is often seen as immodest.)

And her dream of making it to Hollywood seems remote.

"I'd like to be a big star in America," Marina says, "but as long as I don't speak English and don't finish my education, how can I be?"